Goanna as an independent fork of Gecko was first released in January 2016.[2] The project's founder and lead developer, M. C. Straver,[1] had both technical and legal motives to do this in the context of Pale Moon's increasing divergence from Firefox.[6][7]

There are two significant aspects of Goanna's divergence: It does not have any of the Rust language components that were added to Gecko during Mozilla's Quantum project,[8][9] and applications that use Goanna always run in single-process mode, whereas Firefox became a multi-process application.[10][11]